Added together, the starting salaries and bonuses offered to grads of the university's Institute of Advanced Analytics reached $22.5 million, which is 24 percent higher than last year's combined offers. (This is an analytics program, after all; they keep track of these things.)

This meant that lot of employers went home unhappy, unable to get the candidate they were after, despite offering nearly six-figure salaries on average -- and bonuses as well.

The university received close to 800 applications for its next class, three times the number of just two years ago, when it doubled enrollment to 85. The school will offer admission to 99 or 100 students, for an acceptance rate of just 12.5 percent.

"We will turn away quite a large number of applicants this year and a fair number of them are otherwise qualified," said Michael Rappa, the founding director of the institute, which in 2007 became the first in the nation to offer a Master of analytics program. NCSU isn't alone in turning away qualified applicants.

Northwestern University's Master of Science in Analytics, at the Robert R. McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, received 600 applications for 30 openings its September class, its third class since launching the program. That's an acceptance rate of 6 percent, according to a spokesperson at the university.